My grandmother would shanghai pilots at the Havana airport so they'd bring me cartons of mango baby food - the only kind I'd eat. I learned to eat peach later. And in every carton, she'd slip a Cuban record.
My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of this peach orchard. It's actually Peach County, one of the largest peach-growing counties in Georgia. It's very rural, and there is nothing much going on, so I guess that's had a big influence on everything as far as just not having much to do.
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.
So my doctor told me to watch what I'm eating - to read food labels. I'm in the store reading the Fig Newtons label: I've always liked Fig Newtons. I'm reading the label to make sure everything's fine: fat content. I looked at the serving size; two cookies. Who eats two cookies? I eat Fig Newtons by the sleeve: two sleeves is a serving size. I open them both and eat them like a tree chipper; Fig Newton shavings coming off the side.
I stay away from things that I know break me out - I am weirdly allergic to mango and almonds. I take evening primrose and supplements that have EFA fatty acids in them to just balance out my hormones and skin, and I take a lot of vitamin C. I drink a lot of water, try to eat really organic, and try to eat things that benefit my skin.
To find one's way anywhere one has to find one's door, just like Alice, you see. You take too much of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another and you get too small. You've got to find your own doorway into things.
I am not a vegetarian. I subscribe to my own mantra: eat less, move more, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, don't eat too much junk food, and enjoy what you eat. Or, to summarise: eat less, eat better, move more, and get political.
Slice Mango - something that, you know, is a phenomenal drink, but mango is not a flavour that is easily liked by many people in the West. People in Latin America like it. But we do a lot of Mango in India.
We try not to waste food in general. Because as a meat eater it's just responsible to eat as much of the animal as you can. It's also instilled in my family culture, where it's not even an ethical thing, it's just that all those parts are delicious, too. You eat the ears, you eat the intestines, you eat the livers, the hearts.
I don't eat Puerto Rican food in L.A. because it's just too much, too addicting, but I know how to cook, so I can easily make it. I just choose not to because you never stop! I think my favorite would be pollo guisado con arroz blanco y habichuelas. I love tostones, I love maduros! I can eat rice and beans all day long!
As a kid, I'd never have avocado. You'd get some melon and the odd fresh peach. But avocados? Mangoes? I'd never had a mango in my life.
My dad actually was a wonderful person, and also happened to be a hunter and fisherman. And my brothers and I never would eat meat our whole lives. We just wouldn't eat it. We would refuse it. Of course, in that day and age you kind of got forced to eat it. But the minute we all became teenagers, we foreswore it.
All the seasons run their race In this quiet resting-place; Peach, and apricot, and fig Here will ripen, and grow big; Here is store and overplus - More had not Alcinous!
Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred - for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.
Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.
I love pizza so much, I would marry pizza, but it would just be an elaborate ploy to eat her whole family at the reception.